Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the articles “Good Gone Wild” by Eric Jaffe (©2005 by Science Service).

This island of Damas is a half-hour boat ride from the Chilean coast. On the island, it’s dry and rocky. The Humboldt penguins that live there had no ice slopes to slide down in their black-tie apparel. Instead, these desert penguins seek out caves to shade their eggs from the sun.

To see these penguins, visitors usually begin in La Serena, Chile. They drive 40 miles north on a main highway and then cut toward the cost on a gravel road that leads to the fishing village of Punta de Choros. Local fishermen there charge a fee to guide the tourists to Damas by boat. On the island, people are free to walk into the caves where the penguins live. Anyone can watch a mother brooding an egg and snap a picture.

What began in the early 1990s as a place with a few hundred curious visitors has now become a tourism destination that attracts 10,000 penguin peepers a year. Damas provide an example of ecotourism, defined as the practice of visiting sites where exotic landscapes and rare animals are the main attractions to conserve them, and generate income for host communities.

Since this model of tourism emerged some 25 years ago, many special-interest sites, like Damas, have experienced hikes in visitation.

But several recent studies show a more complicated picture of the impact of ecotourism, a practice that remains largely unregulated. The increased crowds lead to population changes in some animals, such as the Humboldt penguin and, some 4,000 miles away in the Bahamas, the Allen Cays rock iguana. A mounting garbage problem caused by over-visitation by turtle viewers threaten the beaches of Tortuguero in Costa Rica. People who live near Ghana’s Kakum National Park have lost access to the forest’s resources and now suffer high rates of unemployment.

“I think there’s been a glib…championing of ecotourism, that it’s a win-win situation.” says Martha Honey, executive director of the Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development in Washington, D.C. But by studying how animals, environment, and cultures respond to ecotourism, “we can set up systems that aren’t having adverse impact.” she says.

Ursula Ellenberg, a biologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, decided to study how human disturbance affects the Humboldt penguins when she was quietly counting their population, but not quietly enough. While she was looking through binoculars from a cliff about 150 meters away, the penguins began racing in all directions. If a cautious researchers can spark such a reaction, she thought, how would the penguins react to a gaggle of shutter-happy tourists?

To study the effects of human-Humboldt interaction, Ellenberg and her colleagues measured the breeding success of penguins on the island of Damas, Choros, and Chanaral, which together make up the Humboldt Penguin National Reserve. The island cluster serves as a good point of comparison: Damas receives 10,000 annual visitors, but Choros and Chanaral are much less accessible from the mainland and attract only 1,000 and 100 tourists a year, respectively.

Ellenberg’s team was the first to study these penguin populations. The researchers monitored eggs, and chicks on each island for 5 months after the penguin mothers laid the eggs. If a nest is abandoned during this period, the chicks usually die. Penguins have many chance to breed during their 20-year life spans, and they would sooner abandon a nest than risk personal harm—say, from an approaching human.

In 2003, the only year that Ellenberg’s group studied Chanaral, the penguins there bred an average of 1.34 chicks. On Choros, the average was just below one chick in both 2002 and 2003. But on Damas, female penguin produced, on average, a little less than half a chick in 2002, and the birthrate dipped well below a quarter of a chick in 2003, Ellenberg’s team reports.

“It’s surprising, when you have islands at such close proximity, that you’d already get a difference,” says Ellenberg. “They should do similarly well.”

As scientist study ecotourism’s impacts, new understandings “need to be fed back into the industry, to educate what is acceptable behavior,” says Honey. “There needs to be a closer alliance between hard science and the tourism industry.”

In the case of the Humboldt penguins, a lack of research led to improper viewing guidelines, says Ellensburg. The Humboldt reserve based on its rules for approaching penguins on a related South American species called the Magellanic penguin, which is far less sensitive to human disturbance.